This Post is Not About My Insecurity

I was going to write about something else today, but this bugged me too much to actually be able to write about anything else. I ran across a NPR article yesterday entitled Pretty Girls Make (Higher) Grades. It's one of those "hey, there's a new study out there with an interesting premise that says something people will want to talk about, so let's write an article about it" kind of articles. And I enjoy those. Usually. But this time, I clicked on the clickbait and opened myself up to a world of hurt.

Read the article for yourself, or don't. It says what you think it says, with a little bit more scientific caveating than the headline could deliver alone. I don't really want to talk about the article. What I want to talk about is my response to the article which, to be totally honest, was, "What do you mean, I didn't earn my grades?"

I want to talk about that. I want to talk about the dazzling certainty I had about my looks in that moment. I want to talk about imposter syndrome and how that thought fed into my worries that maybe I'm not so smart after all. I want to talk about how I shared the article on facebook with the silly silent little girl hope that people would see it and tell me that I'm both pretty and smart and not to worry about any stupid old studies, anyway. I want to talk about my disappointment in myself after I realized what I'd done. I want to talk about cultural and empirical measures of beauty.  I want to talk about what's real and what's measurable and how much those two circles overlap on a Venn diagram of existence, or significance. I want to talk about how I didn't need to hear this news right now. I want to talk about whether all knowledge is useful and helpful in every situation. I want to talk about weakness. And strength.

But I don't know how to have that conversation. A friend of mine read the article and we ended up talking about selfies and getting likes on facebook and the real and hurtful discrepancy between pretty girls and everyone else. And that's a fine conversation to have, but it's not the one I want. I can't put my finger on it, exactly. I want to talk about the damage the idea of beauty does to our bodies, but I want to know where my body stands in that battle. I don't want to stand on either side in arrogance or faux humility. But it's such a slippery idea, how pretty you are, and even people who are paid for their prettiness look unexpectedly unattractive from time to time. And as much as I want to, studies like the one in that article make it impossible for me to completely dismiss the idea of beauty as a useless construct. It has a use. Just not one that I'm comfortable with or completely understand.

I worry that what I want is to be told that I'm pretty and then, out of the power given to me by my looks, dismiss the idea that prettiness makes a difference. That's a different want than I'd have if I knew I was plain and shrugged off the idea of prettiness making a difference. That shrug is a shield against the daggers aiming for my self-worth, but it's one you have to carry- prettiness can never be completely disregarded if you have to shield against it. Still, though, I don't know if those are the conversations I truly want to have. One word from one person would make all of that moot and I'm not in love with the idea of fighting for or against a concept that can be wiped away with a smile from the right source.

I think the conversation I want to have, the one we need to have, is how to fix the system. How do we talk about physical appearance frankly? Do we need to? How pragmatic should we be about beauty and its effects? How do you have that conversation without sentences that are less helpful than you'd think, like, "Yeah, some people are going to judge you based on your looks, but those people are jerks"? Those people are complex humans as well, who may not even know how they're judging those around them based on appearance, and even if they're aware and are making a genuinely douchey choice, how should we understand their actions and try to correct them? How do we avoid talking about positive personality traits like they're some kind of consolation prize? Is there a way to retrain our brains to put the lion's share of the merit we give to other people on their actions and abilities and not on their looks? Can we make that happen without sounding like a 90's after-school special?

There are two doors. One goes to somewhere you desperately want to be and one leads to a slow, painful, but certain death. There's a guard in front of each of the doors. One always lies and one always tells the truth. You're allowed one question to one guard to help you figure out which door you should pick. What question do you ask?

Imagine that society are the guards and self-worth is the place you want to be and I think you have a picture of how this problem feels to me. Now, I can science the crap out of the original riddle- not only are their behavioral postures you can look for in liars, but given the right tools and an actual, physical road leading to a location, you could do geological surveys of the area and make a map without ever having to ask either of the two guards any questions. You could make a third door and make a path connecting to the other two paths and send a robot or a drone to investigate each one. You could get a helicopter and fly out of that situation to the place that you want to be. Also, what if you have a friend? Do you then get two questions and use one to figure out who's lying and the other to figure out which way to go? These kind of things are always better with friends.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that I'm not great at riddles and I don't like problems that are framed like them. I don't want to play the beauty game and, to be real about it, I'm a little confused as to why we have to in the first place. But it seems that we have to and dammit, if I have to play a game, I want to play the best game around.

I just need to know what that is.

Sometimes, You Just Wanna Get in a Fight

When I went to go see the space shuttle in California, my first impulse was to run the length of the room staring up at this real-life spaceship. The next one was to run from the engines up to the nose making rocket noises. I consider both of these reactions to be perfectly natural responses.

Vroom.

What I did instead was completely abandon my friend who had come there with me to walk around the shuttle, mouth open and eyes wide, ignoring every single one of the signs with all the information I could possibly need, just trying to absorb what I was seeing. This thing had been in space. It had taken people to space. People, who were once on the Earth, went up into space in this, and then other people, who were in space, came down to the Earth in this. It's been closer to the stars than I'll ever be. I felt like a cave-lady standing next to an airplane.

Well, a particularly well-read cave-lady who also has a basic understanding of aerodynamics and rocket science and is relatively conversant about the different vehicles used in various NASA projects over the years.

We're basically bros. 

I knew what I was looking at, for the most part, and if I needed to jog my memory, there were the aforementioned informational signs and the internet. So when I rejoined my friend and went over to the rocket engine they had on display in the far back corner of the room and started wondering aloud, mentally placing parts and systems together from the schematic, I didn't really expect a member of the staff to come over and start answering my questions. I also didn't expect him to be so kind and condescending at the same time.

Now, if you know me, you know that I'm a little bit proud of my smarts. It's my go-to fault. The fastest way to piss me off is to even hint that I'm less intelligent than I am. But I summoned all the patience and courage I could and I listened to this man explain concepts that were positively basic. "You say you're an elementary school teacher?" he asked at one point, clearly leaning into the common perception of elementary teachers as young women afraid of science, and in that moment, I wanted to enumerate all of the incorrect assumptions he had made in making that statement, tear them apart with logic and data, and present it with such passion that he'd never again make the mistake of treating a young woman with any less respect than he would an Apollo engineer. I wanted to eviscerate him.

I didn't, you'll be glad to know. Despite the fact that he had totally killed my happy space buzz, I smiled and listened and did what any good presenter does- I listened for good material that I could appropriate into my next talk. I thanked him for all his information when he was done and I walked off to take one more lap around the shuttle. There are some battles not worth fighting and there are some we don't need to fight right then. Plus, he was a sweet old guy who was good at his job, just not at making assumptions about me. I let it go.

But there are also battles whose time has come and that's what I want to focus on this semester. I feel settled, I feel ready, I feel like I've got the time and the ability. If it sounds like I'm giving myself a pep talk, well, maybe I am, and maybe I need to sometimes. If there's one thing a semester back at school has taught me, it's that things can be much more difficult and complex than I can ever prepare myself for. Anyway, all this is to say that I'm going to spend some time on Mondays and Fridays digging into some questions about religion and then science and religion that have come up over the past semester and then also spending some time with some of the movies and TV shows that can lean into those ideas. Wednesdays will still be the usual "Hey I made scones!" kinda personal stuff, so if you're here for that content, never fear. There will always be scones.

I kicked things off on Monday with a longer post explaining where I'm at, headspace-wise, when it comes to Christianity and it's there for you to read at your leisure. As I get more used to the vocabulary I want to use, I might go back and edit that post to tie in more concrete concepts, but it's a place to start. And really, isn't that what a new year is all about? A place to start?

Let's go.

Why Christianity?

I grew up in a fairly homogenous community. I assumed that everyone went to church, except for people who had to work on Sundays, and I assumed that everyone was a Christian the way I assumed everyone thought in English. The words coming out of your mouth might sound different than the ones coming out of mine, but inside, we're saying the same thing. We think the same thing.

I remember asking my Spanish teacher in elementary school why Spanish-speaking people didn't just speak English, if they were all thinking in English in their heads and I was really frustrated when she didn't just answer my question directly. I also remember the first time I met a real Democrat, someone who genuinely disagreed with certain Republican ideas. I thought he was just some smartass making a joke but then I realized, with all the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old, that he really believed what he was saying. Those two moments are connected in my brain as times when the world broke in, letting me see that there are different people out there with different ideas from me and that those different people are real.

I say all this because if I'm going to talk about my current faith, as I intend to do this semester, I need you to see where I started. It was a journey to see that there was even a real choice between Christianity and anything else. I made a Jewish friend in college. That's the first time that I met a living, breathing person who adhered to a different religion than me, other than people who said they didn't believe in anything at all but still celebrated Christmas. Well, okay, I also had a Catholic friend growing up, and for us, that was basically like having a friend of a different religion, but I jumped over that hurdle early on- we all believe in the same Jesus. For the majority of my life, Christianity was the truth, the only thing we could know to be true. The only thing that varied was how true you personally found the truth to be.

But meeting people different from me has made all the difference to me. It's, I dunno, it's like seeing Saturn through a telescope for the first time. Little kids, all the time, they'll run around to the front of the scope to see if there's a picture taped on there because they don't believe that they're seeing a real planet with their real eyes. Or it's like seeing, like, an elk out in nature. Sure, you've seen pictures, you have an idea of what an elk is, but it's still going to be abstract in some way until the living thing is in front of you. Or, you know what, even better, it's the difference between having seen Aladdin and having a roommate whose family is from the Middle East. And that's just a baby step.

As soon as you start to see the crack in the concept that was your complete view of the world, you have two options. You can superglue the crap out of it (because we build up our model of the world for very valid reasons of safety and comfort and our first impulse is to keep that safety and comfort) or you can start to pick at it. And me, I pick at things. You can ask my mother. Once I had it in my mind that people genuinely believed something different from me, I needed to know... everything. I needed to know why people had different ideas about different issues, why there weren't clear correct answers to every question, why there might never be clear and correct answers to every question. At eighteen, I had the world figured out. At nineteen, I realized that everyone else had too, but that we had come to different answers. I needed to know why that was and what it meant. For me, pursuing that question meant looking into other religious faiths.

I was still a physics major, so I didn't have time to take every class available, but I took a Hebrew Bible class and class in Biblical Hebrew, I took an Islamic studies class, I took an Evangelicalism in America class because I honestly didn't recognize that part of my religious heritage as mine until I came into class one day not having read the assigned article but being able to summarize and cite all the Left Behind books. My philosophy credit was in the Religious Studies department, a class called Heaven and Hell that talked about the different ideas of the soul and what happens after we die and it's probably the closest thing I got to looking into any non-Abrahamic religions. Like everything else in education, classes like this really only taught me how much I didn't know, but with each experience, the crack grew an inch or two and more light got in. Meanwhile (and afterwards), I was realizing how wonderful and beautiful the lives of other people who had different views of the world were and I ate up their experiences like the storybooks and novels I read as a kid. It was life-giving.

This kind of autobiographical tale usually ends with some kind of revelation, with the author realizing that everything they knew was a lie and abandoning the faith of their past and, I would argue, putting a new one in its place, either self-reliance or some other new religion, but I didn't do that, not exactly. It's true that I have much more difficulty relying on Jesus than I once did, but the church, man, the church was always there for me. It was the place I felt at home. And I know the church has hurt other people and I know that we need to own that and that we need to be better and I feel deep down in my soul that the only way the church can grow is by holding its community accountable to the standards of radically loving our neighbors and our enemies alike and giving selflessly to the world our prayers, our presence, our gifts, and our service without asking anything in return. That is our witness to Christ and I know sometimes we live it poorly, but it's the witness we have.

The thing is, I broke my little model of the world, the one that told me that the church had it together and no one else did. I don't believe that anymore. I can't. I know too many other people with too many other stories. When my model broke, my understanding of Christianity broke with it. The church should be a glass shard, slicing open my hand when I go to pick it back up and look at it. But it isn't, not for me. It's a leftover bit of convex glass that, in the right light, helps me see myself the way I want to be- loving and loved. All the colors of the world can still be seen through it, just focused differently. If I hold it right, I can see something that looks like heaven, a heaven I want and a heaven I want here, where no one hurts anyone and no one's hurt.

That's worth holding onto. It might be naive and it might not be true, but if it reminds me to be kind to other human beings, if it dares me to care about somebody besides myself, if it helps me frame every action with a view toward the redemption of the world rather than its destruction, then it's worth it to me.

It's a big if, but I'm dumb enough to hope for it.

An Open Letter to Teenage Girls

Dear Teenage Girls,

Don't you dare.

Don't you dare waste everything I've worked for.

Okay, that's harsher than I meant. Let me explain.

See, you hurt me when you post stuff like "share this and see what your friends think about you!" or this gem right here:

I want to sit you down and bake you cookies and watch The Force Awakens or Buffy or Agent Carter and tell you that it genuinely does not matter what anyone else thinks about you. It only matters what you think about yourself and when you share posts like this:

you show me that you aren't sure of yourself, that you need affirmation from outside yourself. You don't. You don't, you don't, you don't. And I need you to see that, for your sake as well as mine.

When I was a teenager, I didn't have the self-awareness to see how much of a special flower I thought I was. I had friends, I thought I was smart, and I went through my daily life without too many worries. I thought I was being saved for someone fantastic, so I didn't really mind it when I didn't get a lot of male attention. I was actually frequently bemused and amused by it. (Justin Thomas, wherever you are, I am exceedingly sorry for laughing at you when you asked me out in the 9th grade. I hope I didn't scar you for the rest of your life.) I shrugged off ideas of what I should look like or how I should act. I had an idea in my head of who I was waiting for and one day, my prince charming would show up and we'd be happy and I could be content waiting for that to happen. Maybe you can identify with that, the waiting part if not the "being content" part.

That mindset saved me a lot of heartache, I think, but it also stopped me from some happiness, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Sometime after I stopped being a teenager, I came to terms with the idea that Charming wasn't going to just show up in my life, as you do. And you meet a lot of temporary people in your twenties and I was in a lot of temporary situations, so I didn't go out looking for him either. You'd think that I'd be able to accept my role in this situation and learn to live with being alone if I wasn't willing to ante up the courage to go out and find someone, but if you think that, you're not a teenage girl.

Teenage girls, I get you now a whole lot better than I did when I was one of you. Hormones show up and mess up everything- periods (nightmares), bras (nightmares), emotions (absurd and perpetual nightmares). Your body gets you noticed or it doesn't and you lose either way- you get used to valuing your appearance or you see the value other girls' appearances give them but not you. You're told by everyone who to be and what to want. You're supposed to chase after romantic relationships. No, you're supposed to focus on school. You should have all these teenage experiences. But, more importantly, you should have a loaded activity section on your college application. You should be cute. You shouldn't care how you look. They might as well make flaming baton twirling mastery compulsory, just to give you a goal that's actually achievable.

That's the situation I found myself in when I hit my twenties. I should be finding myself, sure, but I should also be finding, in my case, a man- someone to complete me or whatever Halmark bullshit they're selling greeting cards with these days. I might have dodged the insecurity bullet when I was a teenager, but it got me right in the heart in my twenties. I wasn't pretty enough. Even when I tried, I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't the girl that got asked out. I wasn't the girl that got looked at. Going through insecurity for the first time in your twenties has the added horror of knowing that your makeup looks ridiculous but not being able to call on expected inexperience to explain your failure. Here I am, a young independent woman and I can't figure out effing eyeliner. Or how to smile at the right time.

But I'm here to tell you that there's a way out. Learn to recognize the messages that are being sent to you. The world is like an encrypted enemy transmission- once you break the code, you have all the information you need to beat them. Recognize that the people who tell you that you have to be pretty are just selling something and now you have to choice of whether you want to dress up your body or not. Recognize that the people who tell you that you have to be dating someone don't understand your strength (and are maybe also selling something) and you get the choice of figuring out who you are when you're by yourself or figuring out who you are when you're with someone else. Recognize that the people who are defining normal for you are inventing a system of understanding the world that benefits them and that they are not thinking of your well-being and you get to have control over what normal is.

This is the only one of these pictures that I'll link to because this kitten is adorable.

Listen, you tiny teenage balls of worry and self-depreciation, you have immense value. Dress up or don't- how someone else reacts to your appearance is their problem. You are a gem either way. Smile at the person who makes your heart beat fast and take it as a blessing if they smile back and a fact of life if they don't. You can't control other people's emotions and thank God for that- it's hard enough to deal with your own. And, miracle of miracles, your worth is not increased or decreased by the number of humans who have a crush on you or want to date you or sleep with you. You breathe. You exist. That simple fact defines your worth much more clearly than the potential thoughts of other human beings.

So stop sharing those passive-agressive posts about how no one likes you or you're not pretty enough or you don't care how you look lol because we all know that "lol" really means that you're dying a little on the inside wishing someone would tell you you're pretty. You're fucking beautiful. Write that in your diary daily until you truly believe it in your spirit so that you can ignore all those voices in the world telling you any different. Or, better yet, accept that beauty is a made-up idea that you can choose to believe or disbelieve.

No, you don't dress up for school because you chose not to. No other reason.

Don't be your own worst enemy here. Make the difficult choice, every minute of every day, to listen to the voices that build you up and to ignore the ones that want to tear you down, even if those voices are in your own head. You'll be better for it. Then, once you know how fantastic you truly are, we can talk about reasonable assessment of skills and setting goals and bringing dreams into reality. But I really do believe that you have to start digging the well of self-worth now, so you can draw the water of self-reliance from it later. Enlist your friends in the project. Hand them a shovel. It's easier than digging alone and, once you've started your own well, you'll know how to help them dig theirs.

I had to work for this realization. You will too. But every single time you shout your ugliness into the world, you dump dirt down my well. You hurt me. Because I know what it's like to believe those lies. It's easier than believing the truth. The truth is that you get to say what is beautiful and what is ugly in the world. It's a terrible responsibility. But it's yours.

Be. Better.

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Love,
A Twenty-Something Bundle of Wavering Confidence

Things I Did in 2015

Some days I think that words are going to become obsolete and we'll communicate through a series of pictures that best express our thoughts and emotions at the time via the memories and meanings read into the images, so in that spirit, here are some pictures that express 2015 to me. Plus, I didn't like any of the collages that facebook automatically generated for me.

From the rafters of the Smith Center- Chapel Hill, NC

Night out with Leigh! -Chapel Hill, NC

Skywatching with the planetarium at Jordan Lake- Chapel Hill, NC

Outside the Flat Iron, after that one time I drove a moving truck to NYC. -New York, NY

NYC

Grand Central Station- New York, NY

Setting up the portable planetarium for shows in the NC Children's Hospital- Chapel Hill, NC

The Old Well in particularly fine form. -Chapel Hill, NC

The Bean with Pamela! (Okay, this might actually be 2014, but it's fantastic, so.)- Chicago, IL

Boston waterfront with Crossflame- Boston, MA

At the airport, beginning our West Wishes adventure. -Charlotte, NC

Grand Canyon, AZ

Bryce Canyon, UT

Anaheim, CA

Disneyland, CA

Angels Game with Joy!- Anaheim, CA

Possibly the last time I was warm- Kitty Hawk, NC

Edinburgh from Princes Street Gardens -Edinburgh, Scotland

Salisbury Crags- Edinburgh, Scotland

Comrie, Scotland

View from the top of St. Paul's- London, England

Things I Loved in 2015

In a fit of nostalgia, I went back through my facebook timeline to see what got my attention this year. This made me realize that I curate the life I present online much more than I thought I did, but it also provided a lot of pop culture that I want to make you aware of, in case you missed the wonders that 2015 had for us.

1. Hamilton

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Let's all just remember 2015 as the year that Hamilton came out and rocked the world. If you haven't experienced it yet (and you're nowhere near New York to see it on Broadway), the whole soundtrack is on Spotify and it's sung-through, so you're not missing any crucial parts of exposition of this hip-hop musical about America's first treasury secretary. All I can tell you is how fantastic it is and how glad I am that Lin-Manuel Miranda exists and made such a glorious thing.

2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

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I have so many thoughts and feelings about the new Star Wars movie, but I'll save them until I have something new to say. Or a compilation of the fantastic things that have been said.

3. Age of Ultron

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For a movie that had so many checkboxes to tick, it was truly a fun ride that gave us smiles and feelings. It's what I want from a Marvel movie and the haters can just step on away. I loved it.

4. Inside Out

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It's that Disney movie about feelings. I own it, so you bring the tissues and we'll just have a grand old time.

5. Live Vol. 4

I have been waiting longer than I want for a new Avetts album and when Seth sang this song at NYE 2014, my heart split into pieces. Of course I bought Live Vol. 4 as soon as I heard about it and I've listened to it at least five times since then. Taking rain like an appaloosa hoof print. It's the Avetts I fell in love with.

6. New Horizons

NASA/APL/SwRI

It was a great year for space news and the flyby past Pluto of NASA's New Horizon probe gave us so many wonderful things.

7. (Probably definitely) Water on Mars

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The photo link has a description of what exactly is going on in this picture, but flowing water on the surface of Mars! Guys! Space news! More reasons for space exploration!

8. Jessica Jones, Daredevil, iZombie, Agent Carter, Agents of SHIELD, and Supernatural

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Each one of these could get their own number on this list, but they're the "current" shows I watched this year. If you've got the time, I have nothing but praise for Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and Agent Carter. If you've got even more time, WATCH iZOMBIE WITH ME. And Supernatural. And Agents of SHIELD. Glorious timesucks.

9. Agora

This fantastic movie (which was on Netflix the last time I checked) tells the story of Hypatia, an astronomer in 4th century Alexandria. It has an extraordinarily intelligent and sympathetic depiction of people who choose religious fundamentalism and those who choose pure rationalism. Plus Oscar Isaac pre-Star Wars. But mostly, the smart stuff.

10. Welcome to Night Vale: The Novel and The Investigators

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Joseph Fink has long said that 2015 would be the best year ever and man, did Night Vale deliver this year. The Night Vale novel was fantastic and I went to go see their touring live show, The Investigators, twice. If you've got minimum fifteen minutes of your life to spend, I'd love to introduce you to a friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.  If you want to start listening on your own, it's available wherever fine podcasts are dropped. (I started listening on Soundcloud- scroll down to episode 1- it's a bit serialized.)

11. Veronica Mars, Casablanca, What We Do in the Shadows

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All movies (and a movie plus a TV show) that I picked up on this year and will now incorporate into my life.

12. Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah

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I cried at the end of the Colbert Report, I cried the most at the end of Jon's run on the Daily Show, and I did all the proxy server acrobatics possible to watch Trevor Noah's first Daily Show. Late night Comedy Central won't be the same, but it's gonna be good. (Also, tip of the hat to Larry Wilmore's show taking over Colbert's time slot- I've been a fan so far.)

13. Wait But Why

waitbutwhy.com

From his post on the impending AI Revolution to his thoughts on religion, Tim Urban has made my life so much better this year. Give some of his posts a read. A fantastic place to start is with the mammoth up above.

14. Postmodern Jukebox

Scott Bradlee had such a fantastic idea and every video they come out with is a winner on some level. Here, just take a listen to this playlist. Your ears will thank you.

15. Humans of New York

"What's the hardest part of being a mermaid?" "Holding your breath."- HONY

You've probably seen the posts around facebook and the internet, but the mind behind Humans of New York goes around New York (and the world) taking pictures of people and telling their stories. Some of his stories have literally changed the lives of the people in the photos, but sometimes they're just adorable and heartwarming. They've also got a book out!

16. Tomorrowland, Ant Man, Mad Max, The Martian

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All four of these are movies that I will watch at the drop of a hat. Again, I hate to not give them all their own bullet point but life is short. 2015 did not disappoint. Hell, if a movie about a superhero the size of an ant can be superb, I can believe anything.

17. Thrilling Adventure Hour (& We Got This & Dear Hank and John)

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This would have been the year of the podcast for me if there hadn't been so many other fantastic things going on. The Thrilling Adventure Hour ended its run, but all the episodes are still up for listening, Mark and Hal from TAH started their own hilarious podcast answering useless questions, and John and Hank of Vlogbrothers fame talk about the impending demise of the entire human race and give out dubious advice weekly on their often funny, often insightful podcast. Oh, and Serial's back this year, but I hardly need to tell the internet that.

Merry 2016, Everyone!

Waking up today was difficult, though maybe not for the traditional New Year's reasons. I didn't so much close out 2015 as run into 2016. That run came in the form of a cancelled flight, two rescheduled flights, a four-hour nap on a plane and half an hour of carrying my luggage through packed Edinburgh streets, because apparently I can't fly into town on a day when the airport bus hasn't been rerouted for some reason. But I was here in time for Hogmanay and Hogmanay in Edinburgh was, as has been my word for 2015, fantastic.

This video is after we sang Don't Stop Believing together as a massive mob and before the "Happy New Year!" guy in the video led us all in a shamefully lyric-lacking version of Auld Lang Syne. I went to the Princes Street party with Clara, a friend of mine from New College, and her friend and flatmate and flatmate's friends and we sang and danced and watched fireworks and it was an exceedingly pleasant way to ring in the new year.

But my body remembered that it had spent twenty-four hours in airports and on airplanes and that it had lugged thirty pounds of clothes and books farther than it ever wanted to and that dancing dehydrated in the Scottish cold was not the kindest set of activities I could have chosen to participate in after such a day. My body woke up around noon sore and with a cold.

You know what, though?

Worth it.

Everything is closed today, so there's no need for me to venture out into the world. I've got oatmeal and ramen and that'll hold me until I can do a proper grocery run tomorrow. Though this does not bode particularly well for my resolutions (to be non-stop and to pay attention), there's nothing stopping me from curling up with my Netflix and taking a vacation day, giving my body the space to find forgiveness for the past day or so.

So, thanks 2015, because you were a lovely addition to the years of my life, and thanks 2016 for all the things you haven't added to my life yet. I don't hold to hopes and expectations but I believe in the general positive nature of the world. Good things are coming our way, be they tiny and insignificant or monumentous and prayed for. I look forward to it.